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Thursday, August 30, 2012

Global Education Strike

The International Student Movement is
calling for global education strikes on October 18th and November 14-21 to
protest education privatization schemes and the corporatization of public
education. They want the teachers to join their movement and are asking
teachers to check out their website and plan
solidarity actions for these dates.

Some of their demands are tangible and
achievable—like increasing education budgets, decreasing student debt and
slowing or halting the giveaway of public education resources to private business—but
not from a couple of days of street protests. Rather, achieving these goals
will require either a remarkable change in public sentiment and political
action or significant and prolonged strike actions by teachers and other education
employees.

At the same time, much of their
program is naïve or incoherent. For example, they bemoan that public education is
being turned into a commodity and that school employees are being exploited, as
if this wasn’t always the case? In order for employees to not be exploited they
must cease to be employees and for education to not be a commodity it must be
entirely free. These are both good goals, but they are not attainable without
social revolution and certainly aren’t going to result from a few days of
protests.

They also argue that education should “primarily
work for the emancipation of the individual, which means: being enabled to
critically reflect and understand the power structures and environment
surrounding him-/herself.” Yet shouldn’t emancipation involve freedom from
domination by these “power structures,” and not just an acknowledgement of
their existence?